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Identity and Demography

Lani Guinier is the Bennett Boskey Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

Updated March 25, 2013, 10:41 AM

Until I went to junior high school I was interracial. I would say, if asked, “my mother is white and my father is Negro.” Or “I come from a ‘mixed’ family.”

One’s individual gene pool is less important than the ethnicity, race, and the economic and social class of the people in the neighborhood in which one was raised.

When my family moved to Hollis, Queens in 1956, the neighborhood changed with our arrival. When we first moved in, Italians, Jews, Albanians, Armenians and Portuguese lived in small, tidy two-family attached houses on both sides of the street. By 1964 there were almost no whites still living on our block except my mother. As the demographics changed, so did our zip code. We were now in St. Albans, part of the burgeoning black migration from Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant to southeast Queens.

In junior high school I became black. I attended Junior High School 59, a magnet school that attracted Jewish students from Laurelton and Italian kids from Cambria Heights. The white students were friendly during the school day, but it was in riding the bus home with the other black students that I felt most welcome. We rode the bus together to an increasingly segregated St. Albans neighborhood. And it was in St. Albans that I felt fully accepted.

When I applied to college I don’t recall any box-checking exercises involving race. I do remember being asked whether any relatives had attended the particular college in question. My application to Radcliffe College stands out for this reason. Radcliffe had a separate admission system for girls who, if they attended, would graduate with a Harvard degree.

My father had been admitted to Harvard College but he dropped out after two years. As a black man in 1929, he was not permitted to live in the dormitories. He was also denied financial aid when he showed up in person to apply. He was told it was because he had failed to submit a photograph with his application. Harvard had a quota for black students, and its quota had obviously already been met.

Box checking, quotas, or some upscale version of the “one drop” rule do not explain the challenging issues of race in the U.S. One’s individual gene pool, in 1964 and 2011, is less important than the ethnicity, race, and yes, the economic and social class of the people who live in the neighborhood in which one is raised and to whom one feels ultimately accountable. Today, race is less about biology and much more about demography.

Thus, for me, the real question is not which box you check, just as the real question for my father was not whether he had failed to submit a photograph. The real question is much more closely related to the experience I had attending Junior High School 59. I did not change my “bloodline” between elementary school and junior high school. What changed for me was the existence of a community in which I felt accepted and to which I ultimately felt responsible.